The thing is, I don’t think the fact that Heathenry is dripping with machismo is entirely the fault of Heathens, after all, they’re only going off what they read in the Eddas, forgetting that the Eddas overwhelmingly focus on what elite men are doing with sharp pointy objects. We don’t get to hear stories about fishermen or farmers (boring) or most women (even more BORING) or pretty much anyone who wasn’t born with a sword and shield by their crib.
Awesome point on bias in the lore from this awesome blog (via amber-and-ice)
This is true for pretty much all written mythologies! “Myth and Reality” (an incredible book you should all read) says this about the Hellenic god-tales: “Though as Plato put it, Homer had educated all Greece, he composed his poems for a specific audience: the members of a military and feudal aristocracy … he did not record all the mythological themes that were in circulation in the Greek world. Then too, he avoided evoking religious or mythological conceptions that were either foreign to his essentially patriarchal and military auditors or in which he took little interest. Concerning all that could be called the nocturnal, chthonian, funereal side of Greek religion and mythology, Homer says next to nothing. The importance of the religious ideas of sexuality and fecundity, of death, and the life after death have been made known to us by late writers and archaeological excavations.”
Seriously, every recon should read this book.
(via hofgythia)
